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Tuesday, July 4, 2017

In May 2003 I attended an American Literature Association
conference in Boston.
I was invited to present a paper on a panel about Bishop and her New England connections. My paper was entitled:
“Elizabeth Bishop and the ‘Boston
States’.” I had only
fifteen minutes to say something on this subject, so I decided to write a poem
exploring Bishop’s ancestry, which had deep roots in both the Maritimes and New England. Earlier that year, Muir MacLachlan, a dear
resident of Great
Village and a Bishop contemporary,
had died. I took his death as the anchor for my talk. I have been wanting to post
this talk on the blog for some time, but various things have delayed me doing
so. The other day I began to read Kay Redfield Jamison’s Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire, A Study of Genius, Mania, and
Character (Knopf, 2017). This well-written, nuanced, insightful book begins
with a dive into Lowell’s
ancestry, as so much of mental illness has a hereditary aspect. Reading
Jamison’s insights brought me quickly back to my little poem, an attempt to
summarize the impact of ancestry on Bishop’s life and art. So, I thought I
would share that long ago conference paper now. Apologies for all the text, but
sometimes pictures are not enough. There must be words.

********************

“There was another little girl in
Primer Class, besides me, and one awful day she wet her pants, right in the
front seat, and was sent home. There were two little Micmac Indian boys, Jimmy
and Johnny Crow, who had dark little faces and shiny black hair and eyes, just
alike....Almost everyone went barefoot to school, but I had to wear brown
sandals with buckles, against my will. When I went home the first day and was
asked who was in Primer Class with me, I replied, ‘Manure MacLaughlin,’ [sic] as his name sounded to me. I was
familiar with manure – there was a great pile of it beside the barn – but of
course his real name was Muir, and everyone laughed. Muir wore a navy-blue cap,
with a red-and-yellow maple leaf embroidered above the visor.” (CPr 9)

On January
3, 2003, Muir MacLachlan died in Great
Village, Nova Scotia.
He was 92 years old. If she were alive today Elizabeth Bishop would be 92 years
old. What does Muir MacLachlan have to do with Elizabeth Bishop and the “Boston States”?
Nothing directly, but he has a great deal to do with Elizabeth Bishop and Great
Village and Nova Scotia; and Great Village and Nova Scotia historically have
quite a bit to do with the “Boston States.”

Muir’s
death marked the passing of an era in Great Village
– he was perhaps the last person there who knew Elizabeth Bishop as a child.
Muir’s advanced age and his death in January are linked in my mind to an
article I read a short time later, which coincidentally was published in the
January 2003 issue of Smithsonian. Written by Mary Duenwald, the article
is entitled “Puzzle of the Century.” It examines the phenomenon of the large
number of centenarians living in Nova
Scotia. To explain why this article is a chain link
in my thinking, I quote a passage:

“Yet the
province’s cluster of centenarians has begged for a scientific explanation ever
since it came to light several years ago. Dr. Thomas Perls, who conducts
research on centenarians at Boston Medical Center,
noticed that people in his study often spoke of very old relatives in Nova Scotia. (To be
sure, the two regions have historically close ties; a century ago, young Nova
Scotians sought their fortunes in what they called ‘the Boston States.’) At a
gerontology meeting, Perls talked to one of [Dr. Chris] McKnight’s Dalhousie
[University] colleagues {Dalhousie is in Halifax,
Nova Scotia}, who reported seeing a
centenarian’s obituary in a Halifax
newspaper nearly every week. ‘That was amazing,’ Perls recalls. ‘Down here, I
see obituaries for centenarians maybe once every five or six weeks.’ Perls says
he became convinced that ‘Nova Scotians had something up their sleeve’ that
enabled them to reach such advanced ages. ‘Someone had to look into it.’ (74)

In January
2003 Tom Travisano invited me to participate in this panel and speak about
Elizabeth Bishop and the “Boston
States.” Thus events,
which might otherwise have remained discrete, became linked in my mind.

I have
written at some length about the close historical ties between the Maritimes
and New England, about the rôle this geo-political, socio-economic
interconnection played in Elizabeth Bishop’s childhood and adolescence.1
The metaphor I have used most frequently is that of migration – the continuous
toing and froing between both regions, so regular in certain eras that it
seemed a force of nature, it seemed as regular as tide. It was so for Elizabeth
Bishop:

“First, she
had come home, with her child. Then she had gone away again, alone, and left
the child. Then she had come home. Then she had gone away again, with her
sister; and now she was home again....So many things in the village came from Boston, and even I had
once come from there. But I remembered only being here, with my grandmother.” (CPr 252, 254)

The idea of
the “Boston States” is inextricably linked to the Maritimes. It is a Maritime
phrase. It has lost much of its currency and relevance in today’s
globalization, yet even in my childhood I remember it being used. When I
was three my parents took a trip (still frequently done then), to the “Boston
States” to visit Nova Scotia friends who had
moved to Worcester.

I decided
the best way to convey the organic quality of this ebb and flow in Bishop’s
life was to write a kind of litany. I have chosen to frame this litany
impressionistically. The facts are multiple and highly intertwined, fascinating
in themselves but too involved to recount here. So I offer a poetic version
instead. Keep in mind that Elizabeth Bishop knew a great deal about each of the
relatives I mention, knew their stories. The “here and there” of this litany
was her earliest “total immersion.” She was a full participant (willing and
unwilling) in the tide of life between these regions.I dedicate these words to the memory of Muir,
and my apologies to Elizabeth Bishop for my awkward narrative (as opposed to
lyrical) lines.

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5 September 2017: Nulla dies sine linea

[Today, near the beginning of a new month traditionally associated with the first day of school we begin a new feature to replace the long-running "Today in Bishop." Each day we hope to post a brief reflection on a line from Bishop's poetry, beginning with the title of the first poem in her first book, North & South. We would be happy to have contributions from the Patronage-at-Large, should anyone be so inclined.]

"The Map"

Not simply "Map": abstract, generalized, a concept more than an object, perhaps not even a noun at all, but an imperative, an imperious directive; nor yet "A Map": token of a type, a random example run across by chance, perhaps, on the dusty dark-fumed oak table in the centre of Marks & Co. once-upon-a-time during a long-anticipated visit to 84, Charing Cross Road just prior to its burial beneath a modernist glass tower, where its once-upon-a-place is now marked by a memorial plaque; no, no, no — "The Map" — unique, archetypal, redolent of all that makes it one-and-only, but also a congeries of interwoven metonymies as patterned and abundant as the sixth of the "La Dame à la licorne" Flemish tapestries ("À mon seul désir") or as Vermeer's "De Soldaat en het Lachende Meisje"— or, yet again, as the map in EB's "Primer Class."

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John Barnstead

I retired in 2014 after forty years of teaching Russian language and literature. I'm a past president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia.

Sandra Barry

I am a poet, independent scholar, freelance editor, and secretary of the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia.

Suzie LeBlanc

I am a professional singer who recently became a great admirer of Elizabeth Bishop's writing. I am also fond of walking and nature and I became involved with the Elizabeth Bishop Centenary because I wanted to have her poems set to music so that I could sing them.